8.13.2009

Why didn’t I try this sooner?

I’ve wanted to make homemade salad dressing for years, but never have. Until now...

Not sure why, but homemade salad dressing seemed like a lofty goal. Like it would probably be more effort than it was worth. Man alive, was I wrong!

But first, let me back up a little bit. This all started recently when we had a bunch of lettuce ready in the garden. While planning out our meals for the week, I noticed that our store-bought salad dressing had all expired. We also had a TON of basil ready to go, and I remembered reading about a basil-infused dressing called Green Goddess that sounded awfully tasty.

So a little searching ensued, and I found and tried this Barefoot Contessa recipe (minus the anchovy paste, because I forgot to get it at the store). Oh me oh my – this was easy and delicious! I expected it to have a very strong basil flavor, but really it just had a very fresh and well-balanced flavor.

Karl’s not a huge fan of creamy dressing though, so I decided to try out a vinaigrette. A little more searching on Allrecipes.com (one of my go-to online recipes resources) let me to this recipe, so I gave it a try. I just dumped all of the ingredients (using regular balsamic instead of white balsamic) into a mason jar, popped the lid on, shook vigorously and then served. Scrumptious! About halfway through his salad, the hubs declared that this was the best dressing he’d ever had and he didn’t ever want to eat store-bought dressing again. I heartily agreed!

So the lesson for the day is this: if it seems intimidating, just go for it!

Hmm, perhaps this means that composting won’t be as hard as I’m imagining...